Who Becomes a Member of Congress? Evidence From De-Anonymized Census Data

Daniel M. Thompson, James J. Feigenbaum, Andrew B. Hall, Jesse Yoder

NBER Working Paper No. 26156
Issued in August 2019

---- Acknowledgments ----

The protocol for this study was approved by Stanford's IRB (protocol #42719) as well as by NBER. For research assistance, the authors thank Brittany Dutton, Qianmin Hu, Elise Kostial, Anna Nakai, Conor Orton, Josh Rose, and Anish Sundar. For helpful discussion, the authors thank Ran Abramitzky, Avi Acharya, Alberto Alesina, Matilde Bombardini, David Broockman, Nick Carnes, Dan Carpenter, Cesi Cruz, Robert Erikson, Anthony Fowler, Matt Gentzkow, Liz Gerber, Justin Grimmer, Alisa Hall, Tarek Hassan, Seth Hill, Brian Knight, Shiro Kuriwaki, Eddie Lazear, Greg Martin, Jaakko Meriläinen, Daniele Paserman, Vincent Pons, Hunter Rendleman, Dominic Rohner, Jesus Rojas Venzor, Wendy Schiller, Erik Snowberg, Chris Tausanovitch, Danielle Thomsen, Francesco Trebbi, Jessica Trounstine, Jennifer Nicoll Victor, the students of Econ 220 in the Fall 2018-2019 quarter, seminar participants at UBC, the Stanford Economics Brown Bag Lunch, the NBER Spring Political Economy Conference, the members of Stanford's Democracy Policy Lab, the Center for Effective Lawmaking Conference, and the 2019 Congress and History conference at MIT and Harvard. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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